15 killed as Wukari vi­o­lence fes­ters

Gun­men yes­ter­day killed 15 people and razed over 50 houses in an early morn­ing at­tack on Nyak­wala vil­lage of Gidin-Doruwa in Wukari lo­cal govern­ment area of TarabaS­tate.

Res­i­dents said the gun­men in­vaded the vil­lage with so­phis­ti­cated weapons at the early hours of Easter Sun­day.

The lat­est at­tack came barely twenty-four hours af­ter the Act­ing Gover­nor Al­ha­jiGarba Umar vis­ited Wukari and held meet­ings with stake­hold­ers on how to put an end to in­ces­sant at­tacks and cri­sis in the area.

Our cor­re­spon­dent gath­ered that spo­radic ex­change of gun­fire rented the air in Gid­inDoruwa com­mu­nity for hours leav­ing many ca­su­al­ties and houses razed down as people fled to the bushes for safety.

“The sit­u­a­tion here is so bad now that some of the se­cu­rity per­son­nel have de­cided to with­draw for safety, but they claimed it is for re­in­force­ment. Those of us that are strong enough, have man­aged to es­cape from the area but our aged ones es­pe­cially the women and the chil­dren, many of them were trapped there, so I be­lieve the num­bers of ca­su­al­ties would at the end of the day ex­ceed that fig­ures”, a res­i­dent told news­men.

The Di­vi­sional Sec­re­tary of the Red Cross So­ci­ety of Nigeria, Lucky A. Na­vokhi con­firmed that there was an erup­tion of cri­sis in the area,but could not make avail­able the num­ber of ca­su­al­ties as the up­heaval was said to be rang­ing.

Ac­cord­ing to him, “there is cri­sis and the fight­ing is still on. So we don’t have any record or in­for­ma­tion to make pub­lic now.”

Taraba Po­lice Pub­lic Re­la­tion Of­fi­cer ASP Joseph Kwaji, con­firmed the at­tack but said he was yet to get the de­tails of ca­su­alty fig­ures as of the time of fil­ing this re­port.

Kwaji, who said the at­tack was launched by un­known gun­men, how­ever noted that a de­tach­ment of po­lice­men have been de­ployed to the area to con­tain the sit­u­a­tion.